May 23, 2017

Don’t overthink this, because it’s quite simple, really. When Democrats’ national position depended on unwavering support from “the Solid South,” we got lots of pro-Southern propaganda: the Lost Cause, Gone With The Wind, Disneyfied Uncle Remus, etc. As a vital Democrat constituency group, southerners, even practical neo-Confederates, were absolved of all sins as long as they stayed in line.

Now the South isn’t “solid” anymore — or, more accurate, it’s becoming pretty solidly Republican — so rather than receiving cultural dispensations, it now gets targeted for cultural warfare.

That’s all that’s going on here. It has nothing to do with morality or decency, any more than it did a half-century or more ago when the national cultural machine took a different position. It’s just politics by other means. The rest is just noise.

Is this analysis highly cynical? Yes. But still probably not cynical enough.